Irving Penn

The photographer Irving Penn put Marcel Duchamp in a corner, exposed Colette's forehead and swaddled Rudolf Nureyev's lithe body in layers of winter clothing. His subjects, who included many of the greatest creative talents of the 20th century, emerged from their portrait sessions with their carefully shaped personas profoundly shaken. Mr. Penn died on Oct. 7, 2009; he was 92.

As one of the 20th century's most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, Mr. Penn's signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide.

As a photographer for Vogue magazine, Mr. Penn produced fashion spreads, still lifes and portraits that rank among the most startlingly beautiful images to appear in a mass-circulation monthly. Usually shot in a minimally appointed studio under natural light, these images shrugged off the ephemeral nature of the print medium and rendered adjectives like popular and commercial beside the point.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, with Richard Avedon playing Pollock to his de Kooning - or perhaps the other way around - Mr. Penn was half of a rivalry that more or less set the parameters for fashion and magazine photography in the postwar period. It is still hard to tell exactly who broke the ice. At first, Mr. Avedon worked for Harper's Bazaar and its influential Russian émigré art director, Alexey Brodovitch (whom Mr. Penn briefly studied with and also worked for). Mr. Penn, at Vogue, collaborated with Mr. Brodovitch's opposite number and fellow Russian émigré, Alexander Liberman. In 1965 Mr. Liberman brought Mr. Avedon to Vogue, and the rivals began to duke it out at closer range.

Although they shared a kind of crystalline perfectionism and sinuous sense of form, the two photographers took essentially opposite aesthetic directions. Mr. Avedon pursued fashion photography into the street, the casino and the circus tent, building the spontaneous aesthetic of pioneers like Martin Munkacsi into a kind of chiseled baroque tour de force that often conveyed a vigorous sense of movement, however starkly arrested.

Mr. Penn claimed the studio as his citadel and devised a late, implicitly classical international style as poised and attenuated as a Saarinen Tulip chair. Paring down, Mr. Penn achieved a calm, clear stasis and a spare but undeniable voluptuousness. The critic Rosamond Bernier wrote that he brought "a new poetry to immobility." The reference was to his photographs of dancers, but it fits all his subjects, animate or not. Mr. Penn is a systemic artist, interested in proscribed formulas and a total, almost surgical control disguised as effortless elegance.

MR. PENN'S STYLE

During the late 1940s Mr. Penn posed his subjects in austere, enclosed spaces created by movable walls and undulating sections of carpet. These backgrounds allowed him to create drama without resorting to easels, books and other props of the sort he had relied on earlier in the decade (Saul Steinberg with his sketchbook, John Cage leaning over a piano).

More important, the sense of physical confinement coaxed telling reactions from his subjects. Mr. Penn recalled in his 1991 book "Passage": "This confinement, surprisingly, seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against." Truman Capote slouches solicitously in his corner; Duchamp strikes a suave, Cary Grant-like pose. Georgia O'Keeffe turns her face directly at the camera but leans ever so slightly to one side, a small gesture that destabilizes the whole picture.

In the 1950s Mr. Penn adopted a new close-up style that remains his preferred way of working. The earliest example, a portrait of Carson McCullers (taken in 1950, but printed, like many of Mr. Penn's works, decades later), has a haunted, confessional quality. Among the other standouts of this period is a 1957 portrait of Picasso in which his wide-open left eye appears to float between his upturned collar and the brim of his hat.

The windows to the soul are firmly shut in some of the later portraits. Sometimes, as in a picture of Ingmar Bergman, this reads as evidence of inner life; other times, as with the notoriously difficult Louise Bourgeois, it comes across as a sign of frustration. A photograph of Arthur Miller splits the difference; he holds one eyelid closed with the tip of his index finger, while the other eye peers out from behind thick glasses.

WHEN it comes to art, few things have the unpredictable resonance of the late work of an accomplished, innovative artist whose place in history is secure. Intimations of mortality bring out something special in a great talent who has no intention of going quietly.

{"type":"article","show_header_text":false,"header":"ARTICLES ABOUT IRVING PENN","query":"(per=\"PENN, IRVING\") and tom!=\"Caption\" and tom!=\"Correction\" and tom!=\"List\" and tom!=\"Paid Death Notice\" and dsk!=\"Society\"","search_query":"(persons:\"PENN, IRVING\") AND -type_of_material:\"Caption\" AND -type_of_material:\"Correction\" AND -type_of_material:\"List\" AND -type_of_material:\"Paid Death Notice\" AND -news_desk:\"Society\"","num_search_articles":"15","show_summary":true,"show_byline":true,"show_pub_date":true,"hide_thumbnails":false,"show_kicker":false,"show_title":false,"show_related_topics":true,"show_rad_links":true,"show_subtopics":true,"exclude_topics":"PENN, IRVING","exclude":["",""],"more_on_header":"MORE ON IRVING PENN AND:","alternate_index_subidx":"","show_thumbnails":true}

August 9, 2013, Friday

On Wednesday the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced promised gifts of 473 photographs from three separate collectors, including a pledge of 26 photographs by Diane Arbus and nearly 350 works by Japanese photographers.

December 6, 2009, Sunday

It wasn't just about Vogue. True, Irving Penn, the photographic maestro of classical elegance who died last week at the age of 92, gave us striking images of models and celebrities. But in 1950 and 1951, in studios in Paris, London and New York, he...